Legal Education Research Group (LERN)

Origins

In 1991 a number of active researchers into legal education and who were also members of the Association of Law Teachers decided to set up the Legal Education Research project (LERP).(LERP was the forerunner of LERN)

LERP had a number of clear objectives:

• To provide a supportive and expert community for current and emerging researchers into legal education
• To develop research skills, especially empirical research skills and provide information and support for accessing funding, developing collaborative links and dissemination of findings
• To encourage a more coherent and evolutionary approach to research programmes and projects and to establish a methodology for identifying and pursuing research ideas and topics

These objectives continued when LERP was re-named LERN in 2006

Members

LERN has two Co–Directors:

Professor Phil Harris
Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Email: p.j.harris@shu.ac.uk

Professor Patricia Leighton
University of Glamorgan, UK
mailto:pleighto@glam.ac.uk or leiglngly@aol.com

The Co-ordinator of LERN is Vera Bermingham
Kingston University, UK
Email: v.bermingham@kingston.ac.uk

The active membership comprises researchers from UK universities and further education colleges. Membership is open to anyone who has an interest in researching legal education. LERN has active links with researchers outside the UK, especially within the EU and several Commonwealth states.

Please contact any of the above for further information on membership and activities.

Activities

The work of LERN comprises two main types of activities.

Informal activities

As one of the core aims of LERN is to provided support to fellow researchers, members offer advice on issues such as questionnaire design, ensuring a good response rate, contacts or people or institutions that might prove useful for the research. To these ends, members will, for example, read and advise on the content and style of questionnaires, provide piloting facilities and feedback on outcomes, suggest publishing opportunities, collaborate on conference papers and comment on drafts of articles.

It is a particular feature of LERN that members frequently work together on projects. Please see below for examples of that work. However, LERN members also work with other members of the wider academic community and aim to develop their interest in legal education rseaerch or enhance their research skills

Formal activities

LERN runs research methods workshops to explore best practice in empirical methods and related issues. These are designed to develop skills but also to build confidence and share experiences.

Examples of the workshops are:

• October 2008, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. This was designed to assist researchers to take ideas forward and members reflected on the experience of various research methods and their appropriateness for specific research ideas. Members worked on a specific project that was in its early stages and offered advice and “tips” on how to best progress it.
• The 2001 workshop University of Glamorgan, Wales, UK. This explored how best to research the impact and implications of student feedback.
• The next Research Workshop will be in early February 2009 and focus on qualitative methods.
  

LERN regularly contributes to legal education and other conferences and events. These include the ALT’s annual and other conferences, the UKCLE’s annual LILAC conference at the University of Warwick, ELFA, Socio-legal Studies Association’s conference and workshops, the Special Interest Group of the Society of Legal Scholars. Members have also made presentations based on their research to key policy –making groups. These have included the Advisory Committee on Legal Education(ACLEC), the Law Society, the Law Publishers Group and the Welsh Assembly Government.

The role of research findings for policy development and initiatives/changes in the higher and further education sectors has become an increasingly important. LERN is committed to highlighting the importance of research in decision-making of various kinds. Prominent here has been the lessons of research on the legal profession’s selection of recruits, the nature and delivery of continuing professional development, the aspirations and experience of law teachers themselves, resourcing law schools, responses to cheating/plagiarism by law students.

LERN Research Projects

Information is presented here using the name of the principal researcher and presenting the data with the most recent projects first.